Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Unable to fathom the enormity of their act, the Germans then refused an American request to have Miss Cavell’s remains exhumed and handed over to the British for burial. With neutral opinion already hardening against Germany, The Times’s view of the effectiveness of the action in furthering the British cause was quickly proved entirely right: the American press, still nursing the grievance of the Lusitania, was ferocious. At home, outpourings of incontinent rage from correspondents to newspapers confirmed the extent of the propaganda gift.

  Stamfordham, on behalf of the King and Queen, wrote to Miss Cavell’s mother on 23 October to describe their Majesties’ ‘horror at the appalling deed that has robbed you of your child. Men and women throughout the civilised world, while sympathising with you, are moved with admiration and awe at her faith and courage in death.’13 A memorial service took place in St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 October, where Queen Alexandra led the mourners, and her son the King – who the previous day had fractured his pelvis when being thrown from his horse inspecting troops at the front, and his horse had rolled on him – and the Queen were represented; Asquith and several cabinet colleagues attended.14 Seats set aside for the public were taken hours before the service began, and hawkers stood outside selling memorial postcards of the martyred heroine. Six hundred nurses attended, and the band of the Life Guards played Chopin’s funeral march and the Dead March from Saul. The site of the Cavell statue was announced on the eve of the service; and cities from Melbourne to Toronto announced that they would commemorate her.

  While Nurse Cavell’s execution, and another wave of Zeppelin raids, unquestionably stiffened public resolve, the mood remained tense. A rumour circulated that ‘the King and Queen have not regularly spent the night at Buckingham Palace, but slipt [sic] off to one of their London friends’: it was entirely without foundation.15

  II

  By the time Miss Cavell became a symbol of martyrdom, Britain had also acquired a symbol of sacrifice. Word reached England at the start of the Gallipoli campaign that Rupert Brooke, whom Margot Asquith described as ‘the beautiful young poet’, had died of septicaemia on a French hospital ship near the Greek island of Skyros, with perfect timing, on the afternoon of St George’s Day.16 He was serving with her stepson Oc in the Royal Naval Division, and was in Egypt en route for the Dardanelles when a mosquito bite felled him. Brooke had been asked to join Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff, but had refused, wishing to fight alongside the other men. Mrs Asquith had seen him, with Oc, just before embarkation: ‘He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me with his beautiful eyes and kissed me in Oc’s little wooden tent at Blandford on 26th Feb 1915,’ she recalled in her diary. The news had reached Downing Street by the evening, as the fleet in which Brooke had served was moving to its battle stations near Gallipoli: Asquith said: ‘it has given me more pain than any loss in the war.’17

  The Times, which wrongly reported Brooke as having died from sunstroke, carried an appreciation of him by ‘WSC’ – Churchill, the patron of the unit in which he had served. ‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other,’ the First Lord wrote.18 ‘Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.’ All the seeds of the myth are in this short article. ‘He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.’ One cannot doubt Churchill’s sincerity: but this was a propaganda opportunity of the highest calibre, and he seized it. Others had already realised the potential to harness culture for the war effort: Brooke’s death exemplified that potential.

  He had told Mrs Asquith he expected to die, and embraced the prospect: that indeed was the theme of his five war sonnets, two of which were published as he left England, and which accounted for much of his posthumous fame when all were issued a month after his death in 1914 and Other Poems. The war stimulated an outpouring of verse, most of it execrable, with The Times publishing a poem almost daily during the conflict, usually by reputable poets. Brooke’s verse is far from execrable and, as Wells noted, ‘An early death in the great war was not an unmitigated misfortune.’19

  The opening lines of the first sonnet are an ostentatious, but no doubt sincere, death-wish:

  Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our Youth, and wakened us from sleeping

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping …20

  The sonnet ends proclaiming that ‘the worst friend and enemy is but Death.’ The fifth and most celebrated of the poems seems to go further and accept the likelihood of death. Its fame spread almost instantly, supercharging the myth of Brooke even before he died, when on 4 April William Inge, the Dean of St Paul’s, read it from the pulpit:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England. There shall be

  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

  A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

  A body of England’s, breathing English air,

  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

  And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

  Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

  Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

  In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.21

  Ironically, what remained of this idealism would be blown away by the failure at Gallipoli itself. Brooke’s tone would rapidly pass out of fashion, as would the mostly vainglorious verse that The Times and other periodicals published at this time, as the reality of mud, blood and rotting, mangled corpses impressed itself upon the men at the front. Certainly, the glory of war was never the same again for Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a fellow of All Souls, who served with Brooke and assisted at his funeral amid a grove of wild olive trees on Skyros; and was so deeply affected by the futility of his death that he seemed to lose the will to survive his friends (he died on the Western Front in 1917). On his way to the Dardanelles Shaw-Stuart had written the poem by which he is remembered, ‘Achilles in the Trench’, and which finishes with lines Brooke, perhaps with slightly fewer poetic gifts, must have dreamt of writing:

  I will go back this morning

  From Imbros over the sea;

  Stand in the trench, Achilles,

  Flame-capped, and shout for me.22

  Evoking the Iliad, Shaw-Stewart clings to the romance of war, to an extent. He would not do so much longer. Two days after Brooke died, the joint military operation at Gallipoli began.

  The evolution of total war, with the civilian population increasingly devoting itself to fighting, manufacturing or volunteering, had a profound effect on culture; and it would last well into the 1930s. It altered the imagination; but it also inevitably interrupted, or re-routed, cultural work in progress. Roger Fry had written to a friend in August 1914 that ‘it is over with all our ideas.’23 Given the new directions in which war would send creativity, Fry was right about that. The culture we associate with the Great War is often the culture produced by those who came through it and recorded it in the years afterwards. For example, Ford Madox Hueffer published his Parade’s End tetralogy under his anglicised name of Ford Madox Ford between 1924 and 1928; Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves would return, post-war, to their memories of the trenches; and so would composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arthur Bliss, whose music was heavily influenced by their experiences of war. Those experiences did not, with the odd exception, immediately translate into
cultural output. However, some artists’ reputations were inevitably based mainly on their work during the war, because they were dead by the Armistice: such as Wilfred Owen and, as a poet, Edward Thomas.

  Culture in its broadest sense – notably music, art and literature – served two main purposes during the war. First, it maintained a sense of civilisation superior to the base values of the nation against which Britain was fighting, and thus had some utility in providing reasons to beat the Germans. Second, it provided relaxation and diversion for the public, as well as inspiration. Even when the Brooke idea of war had been utterly repudiated, the creative arts did not question the justice of the fight against the Germans. The cheaper sort of fiction – especially the weekly adventure stories for boys and young men – was soon dominated by tales of the war, and of heroic Tommies doing a beastly but necessary job. Cecil Mercer, a second lieutenant in the County of London Yeomanry, wrote weekly tales of derring-do until his regiment left for Egypt in March 1915; he survived and, as Dornford Yates, became one of the best-known writers of the inter-war years. From January 1915 Captain H. C. McNeile’s stories of life at the front began to appear in the Northcliffe press. As serving officers were forbidden to publish under their own names, Northcliffe gave McNeile – a Royal Engineer – the sobriquet of ‘Sapper’. McNeile knew his stuff: he had reached France with the BEF in November 1914, fought in the First and Second Battles of Ypres and on the Somme, and after participating in the great advance of September 1918 finished the war as a lieutenant colonel with a Military Cross and several mentions in dispatches: he had spent thirty-two months of the war in France, and said he started to write out of boredom. Well before the end of the conflict he was a household name, or nickname, his short story collection The Lieutenant and Others having sold 139,000 copies in less than two years. He later created Bulldog Drummond.

  A cultural and recreational life continued, with concerts, the theatre, the cinema – mainly newsreels and American silent films – and new literary works. The theatre offered predominantly hack-written plays or musicals on patriotic themes, such as England Expects by Seymour Hicks, one of the more celebrated actors of the era (who would win a croix de guerre by taking his touring company to France to cheer up the troops) and Edward Knoblock. England Expects included the song ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go’, and during the interval featured Horatio Bottomley, in front of a Union flag, orating about the wickedness of the Hun, and urging young men not in uniform to join up; at most performances some enlisted immediately.

  For others, though, adaptation to the national mood proved difficult or impossible. Pre-war playwrights such as Galsworthy and Shaw wrote less than before, Shaw having continual trouble with the censor in wanting to make comments about the war and Ireland that were deemed unacceptable. Pinero passed out of fashion, his work representing, like Elgar’s, an idea of an age that, after just months of war, was seen to have gone for ever. Elgar joined the special constabulary, but became so depressed by the war that he produced very little during it: incidental music to a play, The Starlight Express, and a ballet, The Sanguine Fan, were far from his most inspired works. The Spirit of England, settings of three poems by Binyon that when he began to write the work in 1915 were very much in keeping with the mood, already jarred when finished in 1917. In May 1916, in the first of a series of charity concerts for the Red Cross, its opening two movements were performed at the Queen’s Hall, the first a setting of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, performed in the presence of the King and Queen. His creative drought was unfortunately timed, as patriotic impresarios were programming more and more British music in concerts. (Attempts to ban Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms failed dismally, proving that quality prevails in most marketplaces.) As the war neared its end Elgar’s creativity suddenly had an Indian summer, culminating in the Cello Concerto of 1919: but it was a blossoming that died almost as soon as it had started, with the death of Lady Elgar in 1920.

  The war years nevertheless produced notable enduring creative works. While working for the Red Cross in Egypt E. M. Forster was writing, but did not publish until 1924, A Passage to India. Despite working for the Ministry of Information, directing propaganda towards France, Arnold Bennett completed his Clayhanger trilogy with These Twain in 1916, then wrote two war-related novels, The Pretty Lady and The Roll Call, both published in 1918; a novel based on his wartime experiences in Whitehall, Lord Raingo, would not come out until 1926. His friend Wells also continued to produce novels despite later on being engaged in propaganda work, three of which dealt directly with the effects of war and urged hope: Mr Britling Sees it Through, Joan and Peter and The Soul of a Bishop. Hueffer, shortly before joining up in 1915, published The Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf, in exile at Richmond-on-Thames, published only The Voyage Out during the war, mostly written between 1910 and 1912: but it did launch her reputation as a novelist.

  Painting was a rare art form – unlike musical composition, literary novel-writing, drama or architecture (the latter nearly non-existent because of manpower shortages), but like poetry – that did not greatly decline during the hostilities. London hosted numerous exhibitions throughout the war, albeit of more conventional art, and often depicting the conflict. The creative focus was increasingly war-related; at the Royal Academy Exhibition at the end of April, the most remarked-upon work was Richard Jack’s magnificent The Return to the Front, which The Times described as ‘a picture of Victoria Station crowded with khaki-clad warriors … [it] has about it something of the real thing.’24 The newspaper hoped that ‘Britain might thus become possessed of worthy memorials of the greatest epoch in the country’s history, and a true Renaissance of Art might be brought about under the stress of a noble and all-pervading emotion.’ Again, it was a means to assert moral superiority over the Hun.

  Initially, war presented some artists with an opportunity to break with rules that they felt confined them, and go off in a wildly unpredictable direction. Indeed, this had begun towards the end of peace. Vorticism, a branch of modernism rooted in cubism and its geometric effects on design, but also applied metaphorically to the written word, had raised its head with the publication in June 1914 of the Vorticist magazine Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis, who had trained at the Slade but had acquired most of his artistic influences in Paris. It rejected everything traditional about English art and culture. Blast’s second and final issue appeared in July 1915, following the opening on 10 June of the Vorticist exhibition at the Doré gallery in London.

  Blast certainly influenced the radical changes in graphic design after the war and for some decades beyond: but its attempt to have art exceed life was rapidly and comprehensively challenged by life’s ability to exceed art: nothing the Vorticists could do could shock so much as what was really happening in the war; and so even Vorticism found itself trumped and surpassed. In any case, most aesthetes had more on their mind in the summer of 1915 than a desire to explore and champion this self-conscious foray into cultural radicalism. Lewis himself became an artillery officer and, in December 1917, an official war artist.

  Where innovation did thrive it often ignored the war altogether. In late September 1915 Methuen published Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It upset reviewers, who were annoyed by its sexual content, especially by Ursula Brangwen’s lesbian relationship with her teacher, Winifred, in whose arms Lawrence describes her as lying, ‘her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast.’25 Such talk interested the Director of Public Prosecutions, who had the police seize the publisher’s entire stock of the book and charged Methuen under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. On 13 November The Rainbow was banned, Methuen apologised and 1,011 copies were burnt. It would be more than a decade before it was again available in Britain. Two days later Lawrence sent the manuscript of the novel to Lady Ottoline Morrell: ‘If you don’t want it you can have it burnt, otherwise it might lie at Garsington till it is worth the selling. I don’t want to see it any more.’26 He thought about emigrating to Florida, but
was denied the necessary official permission. Instead, he contented himself with going to his sister’s in Derbyshire when not slumming it at Garsington and discussing human relations with Bertrand Russell, who was camping at Garsington while T. S. Eliot, a former pupil, and his wife stayed in his London flat. Lady Ottoline’s reward for sheltering the Lawrences would be his parody of her as the ghastly Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, which he began to formulate that winter.

  Gustav Holst, as a composer an artist in a very different medium, had been rejected for service because of poor health, and carried on teaching at St Paul’s Girls’ School and writing music. Some of this seems to ignore the war altogether: his Nunc Dimittis was first performed at Easter 1915. He remained the eclectic artist he had always been: his fascination with the Orient prompted his Japanese Suite, also written at the suggestion of Michio Ito, a Japanese dancer then performing at the Coliseum in London. Japanese culture was very much in vogue; Holst sat in the dancer’s dressing room one afternoon while he whistled Japanese folk tunes to him, and Holst noted them down. These works were written while he was composing The Planets, partly an exercise in bitonality, which took him the best part of two years, and the Japanese Suite became the first of Holst’s works performed at a Promenade concert. Holst, once he had finished The Planets – which for another two years remained unperformed – embarked upon the Hymn of Jesus, and in 1916 began a Whitsuntide music festival in Thaxted in Essex, where he had rented a cottage since 1913, under the patronage of its socialist vicar, Conrad Noel. It would be ironic that later, because he needed the money, Holst – the least jingoistic or nationalistic of men – allowed the big tune from Jupiter in his Planets suite to be used for ‘I Vow to thee my Country’.